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0 pointsschneems11mo ago0 comments

I wish for ecosystems that would let maintainers ship deprecations with auto-fixing lint rules.

0 comments

Yeah, not only is the structure of business workflows often resistant to mature software dev workflows, developers themselves increasingly lack the discipline, skills or interest in backwards compatibility or good initial designs anyway. Add to this the trend that fast changing software is actually a decent strategy to keep LLMs befuddled, and it’s probably going to become an unofficial standard to maintain support contracts.

On that subject, ironically code gen by ai for ai related work is often least reliable due to fast churn. Langchain is a good example of this and also kind of funny, they suggest / integrate gritql for deterministic code transforms rather than using AI directly: https://python.langchain.com/docs/versions/v0_3/.

Overall.. mastering things like gritql, ast grep, and CST tools for code transforms still pays off. For large code bases, No matter how good AI gets, it is probably better to get them to use formal/deterministic tools like these rather than trust them with code transformations more directly and just hope for the best..

jwhitlark10mo ago

https://github.com/clj-commons/rewrite-clj is an absolute superpower for this kind of thing, if you were using Clojure. It always saddened me it doesn't get more exposure.

As good as Rust is, I still feel there needs to be a "high-low" strategy for most biz/game code. You want to be able to depend on your low level abstractions, while constantly changing up how you fit them together.

twic11mo ago

In the Java universe, there is OpenRewrite for this: https://github.com/openrewrite/rewrite

eg: https://docs.openrewrite.org/recipes/java/migrate/joda/jodat...

I occasionally notice libraries or frameworks including OpenRewrite rules in their releases. I've never tried it, though!

wolvesechoes11mo ago

Modelica, which is a DSL for modelling DAE systems, has a facility of automated conversions. You can provide a script that automatically modifies user's code then they upgrade to newer version of your lib, or prints the message if automatic migration is not possible.

It is very strange that more mainstream languages do not have such features (and I am not talking about 3rd party tools; in Modelica conversions are part of the language spec).

mike_hearn11mo ago

Kotlin has some limited support for that:

    @Deprecated(replaceWith = "new expression")

Only works for simple cases but better than nothing. For more, there's OpenRewrite.

quotemstr11mo ago

They do. They're called stable, versioned interfaces and work in any language

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